29 March 2008

The Subject

I said before how one of the revisions I was asked to make in my thesis was to add a description of how I was using the concept of the "subject." I was initially quite irritated with having to do this, but I've finished that portion of my revisions, and what I wrote kind of made me happy. So it appears that this complaint was a blessing in disguise. To wit:

As mentioned above, popular discourse often conflates gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, transgendered, and other queer persons into a single identity. Images and representations of queer people are constantly being produced in various media and come from numerous sources, leading the philosopher Didier Eribon to state that “As Barry D. Adam comments, a gay man finds himself confronted with a ‘composite portrait’ of himself, proposed by a set of images, representations, and discourses, all providing him with a degrading or inferiorizing image of himself.” In Eribon’s narrative, Barry D. Adam is hailed by the representations of gay men in public discourse. Throughout this document, I refer to the “composite portrait” that interpellates Adam as “the queer subject.” The subject is created by discourse and exists as a discursive representation of an actual queer body. Characters in plays represent and stand in for actual queer lives, and these representations both exist within and shape discourse about queer people. The queer subject, then, is what Eribon calls a “contested space, a space of political and cultural conflict” (75). The queer subject is an object of discourse that has the power to shape popular (heteronormative) conceptions of actual queer lives, and the production of these images is, therefore, a crucially important site for exploration.

AND I don't really have to fix my citation method at all. I had to add a couple of words and delete some commas and that's it!